Content Marketing Begins At Home

Robust content production, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media participation. All of these reflect a commitment to content marketing.

And, lately, I’ve been seeing another sign of investment brands thinking like publishers: The appearance of “ads” on Website pages designed to drive traffic to other pages on the site.

I put quotation marks around “ads” because there’s no payment involved when it’s your own site, just the creation and placement of a graphic. (Unless some of you are managing to charge business units as a means of developing a digital marketing revenue source, to which I would tip my Chicago Blackhawks cap to you. Nice work if you can get it.)

For purposes of this post, an ad is a counter-message to what appears on the page. It’s not Related content or a Learn More element. Its purpose is to lead site visitors elsewhere. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Give That Twitter Account Some Support!

Look at how MainStay Investments calls attention to the firm’s relatively new (and second) Twitter account @MainStayMunis. A Twitter account promo appears in the right-hand column of many pages. But so there’s no chance of anyone overlooking it, the Products & Performance listing in the center of the page has been shoved down to accommodate the ad.

Oppenheimer Offers Options

It stands to reason that if someone is reading one commentary, he or she might very well be interested in other commentary. Below is a screenshot of a partial page of the Oppenheimer Weekly Market Review. Note the dueling promo on the left-hand side linking to a video on emerging markets.

T. Rowe Price Follows The Eyeballs

The most trafficked pages make the most sense for promotions. Example: This week T. Rowe Price’s Mutual Funds landing page was the home to not one but two graphics created to drive interest in fresh content.
 

John Hancock Doubles Up

Usually, product profile pages are sacrosanct. There’s more than enough to say about the product in question, let alone mention any other product. But in this example I’ve been saving for a while, check out how one John Hancock fund seeks to leverage attention paid to another fund.
 

This is a screenshot of an iPad ad landing page. While John Hancock paid to advertise the John Hancock Alternative Asset Allocation Fund, the intent of the leaderboard size ad at the bottom of the landing page was to drive traffic to another fund profile. Toward the end of last year I could have sworn I saw the same Big Box Opportunities ad on random (to me, not to John Hancock) fund profile pages on the site. Unfortunately, I can’t find it on the site to show you today.

Worth A Try?

One message per page. That's a direction from back in the day when we all believed that people would arrive at a Website's home page and leisurely browse the rest of the pages on the site. Oh the naiveté. Today we know 1)that interior pages can get 10 times the traffic of the home page and 2)the most effective way to get attention for something new online is to barge in on something that already has an established audience. 

The "violating" of tidy, single-purpose pages may require some explaining to business stakeholders. But experimentation with with a few spot ads shouldn't meet up with many technological hurdles, although some content management systems will support better than others. One way or the other, you should be able to add a counterprogramming graphic to a few well viewed pages. Be sure to include tracking code and then watch your analytics to see if you've successfully boosted the visibility of the new content. Worth a try?

5 Examples Of What Works For Asset Managers On Facebook

What works on Facebook? Here’s a quick look at five asset manager posts that are generating the most response lately, as measured by the number of people who have “liked” the update.

Likes are a good thing. Brands whose Facebook fans engage with them more regularly (via Likes, Shares, comments or check-ins) have a greater likelihood of being seen in fans' news feeds. And this can result in amplifying the reach of your updates to your users' networks.

Across the board, this industry is woefully behind the Like totals being racked up by others. At the tippity top is Coca-Cola, whose 58 million likes make it Facebook’s most liked brand (after Facebook, that is). The most liked asset manager is Vanguard, with 115,000 likes as of this writing.

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Videos Humanize Mutual Fund, ETF Firms—All That's Needed Now Is Viewers

When was the last time you went to the movies? And by that I mean, when did you last watch an asset manager video that you didn't have a hand in producing?

If it's been a while or...never, you are not alone as mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms' videos continue to languish in obscurity. While other brands in other industries consistently report success with video, investment firm-sponsored videos do well to attract three-digit view totals on YouTube. (See a lonnng Rock The Boat Marketing post on this from June of last year.)

But low viewership is not stopping firms from elevating their art, as this selection of recent videos suggests.

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Want People To Care? Tell Them A Story

Note: The Wall Street Journal published a blog post earlier this week (“Are We All Braggarts Now?”) that I fear might apply to me vis-à-vis the bragging I do about the next generation of my family. If you indulge just one more post referring to the accomplishments of my nieces and nephews, I pledge to reform. 

Members of my family, me included, have been beating a path to our nation’s capital this summer for a once-in-a-life opportunity: To get a tour of the U.S. Capitol from none other than my nephew the congressional intern.

Those 2.5 hours were among the most fascinating I’ve ever spent, and not just because we were given VIP treatment. But because even when you’re learning and re-learning about the home of the legislative branch of the U.S. government—whose history ought to be riveting enough—the stories to be told trump the facts and figures every time.

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Why You Can't Just Jump Into The Conversation

“People are talking online about you and the business you’re in. You want to take part in that conversation, you want to be in the mix.”

When mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms are early in their exploration of communicating off their own domains, that kind of exhortation by me or somebody like me is usually met with a blank stare. That’s the best case. The worst case is when they pretend they’re listening but they’re really just planning their broadcast schedule for the social sites.

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